July 12, 2008

Social CRM in Pictures....and Words

Just getting back from my first "official" Social CRM keynote at Intelliworks user conference - Personify Education '08. Intelliworks creates relationship management products and services aimed at institutions for higher education. And based on the comments I heard from folks attending the conference, Intelliworks must be doing things right. In fact one of their customers, Luis Casas - Director of Marketing at Florida International University's Business School, did a great presentation on how they've integrated Web 2.0 strategies with Intelliworks products to drive up enrollment. Check out the site they've put together called Uncommon Thinkers to get a peek at a cool audacious online act that's snagging attention.

My presentation centered on the new dimension social crm is adding to the more traditional aspects of customer relationship management. I was really happy with the crowds participation and response to what I was touching on. One thing I noticed was a reaction to the following slides (click pics to see larger images):

I also popped up a snapshot I took from TwitterSpectrum. TwitterSpectrum creates tag clouds from two words to show how twitterers relate them. Here's what shows up when I put "social crm" to the test:

I loved that people agreed that both these views of CRM are important. Marrying the traditional, more operations/transactions focused CRM with the content-driven conversation based dimension. If you had to concoct a formula, maybe it would be something like: Traditional CRM + Social CRM = REAL CRM. Meaning the customer relationship management tools and strategies we needed all along.

Many thanks to Dan Obregon, Intelliworks' Sr. Marketing Manager, for inviting me to participate in the conference. The whole team, headed up by CEO Todd Gibby, put together a great event. I totally enjoyed it!

1 Comment

Wonderful post, Brent. This is the clearest definition of social CRM I've seen to date (no pun intended, ok maybe a little.) I'm not at all surprised that your audience responded so favorably. I'm a pictures person and I think most everyone else is, too. These are some pretty complex concepts that you convey (very well) in just a couple of slides. It should definitely help me shape my thoughts around socialprise applications in the CRM/SFA space. Thank you!